The former head of Kazakhstanā€™s intelligence service, Alnur Mussayev, recently claimed in a Facebook post that Donald Trump was recruited by the KGB in 1987, when the 40-year-old real-estate mogul first visited Moscow.

The allegation would, if true, be a bombshell. Mussayev provides no documentary evidence ā€”but then how could he? He alleged that Trumpā€™s file is in Vladimir Putinā€™s hands.

Mussayev isnā€™t the only ex-KGB officer to have made such an assertion. Several years ago, Yuri Shvets, a former KGB major now resident in Washington, D.C., served as one of the key sources for Craig Ungerā€™s best-selling book, ā€œAmerican Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery.ā€

Just after Mussayev made his claim, another ex-KGB officer living in France, Sergei Zhyrnov, categorically endorsed the allegations in an interview with a Ukrainian journalist. According to Zhyrnov, Trump would have been surrounded 24/7 by KGB operatives, including everyone from his cab driver to the maid servicing his hotel room. Zhyrnov said that Trumpā€™s every move would have been recorded and documented, and that he could have been either caught in a ā€œhoney trapā€ (ā€œAll foreign-currency prostitutes were KGB ā€” one hundred percent,ā€ he said) or perhaps recorded bribing Moscow city officials in order to promote his idea of building a hotel in the Soviet capital.

None of these former KGB operatives has provided evidence, but the fact that three KGB agents located in different places and speaking at different times agree on the story suggests this possibility should not be dismissed out of hand. If thereā€™s one thing weā€™ve learned from the first Trump administration and from the initial weeks of the second, it is that everything, including what appears to be impossible, is possible.

Also lending credence to the allegations is the fact that kompromat on Trump would easily, simply and convincingly explain the presidentā€™s animus toward NATO, Europe and Ukraine, his admiration of Vladimir Putin and his endorsement of authoritarian rule. One could even invoke ā€œOccamā€™s razor,ā€ the philosophical principle that claims that simple explanations should be preferred to complex ones.

We could then dispense with contorted explanations that focus on Trumpā€™s mercurial and narcissistic personality on the one hand and American party realignments on the other. Indeed, even if true, these explanations could be accommodated as bells and whistles adorning the central narrative propounded by three KGB agents.

Naturally, Trump and his supporters will bristle. Surely, the three KGB agents are on somebodyā€™s payroll. Who wouldnā€™t want to discredit the U.S. president? It could be the CIA or FBI, except that these are now firmly in the hands of Trump loyalists. Besides, would they have the ability to buy or coerce residents of Kazakhstan and France? Ditto for other Western intelligence services.

Perhaps itā€™s Putin? But he surely has no interest in undermining a president who supports his policies toward Ukraine, NATO and Europe.

Somewhat more plausible would be an officer or officers within the Russian intelligence community who oppose Putin and Trumpā€™s designs. This version seems unlikely, but only at first glance, since we know that Putinā€™s seemingly impregnable regime is actually riven with cracks.

But why would a clandestine opposition make up a story and convince Shvets to spill the beans several years ago? Wouldnā€™t the dissidents know itā€™s true?

Perhaps all three ex-KGB agents are simply lying, in the hope of attracting attention and bolstering their fame? A resident of Washington might have this motive, but a Kazakh and Frenchman?

What leads me to think that there might be something to the allegations is the fact that an acquaintance had a very similar experience at just the same time. A left-leaning ladiesā€™ man, he was wined and dined in Moscow for several years in the late 1980s, courted by the ladies ā€” by his round-the-clock interpreter, as well as by a woman who approached him in a department store and invited him home.

Weā€™ll probably never know the truth. But even with no slam-dunk evidence, the allegations should be, to say the least, disturbing, especially for the genuine patriots in the MAGA camp.

  • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    Itā€™s not really all that new, as an allegation.

    I often feel like the world has collective amnesia of the time period between 2017 and 2021.

    • AtariDump@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      Iā€™ll bite. What happened?

      Asking honestly because 2017-early 2020 is fuzzy and then itā€™s all weird distorted ā€œCOVIDā€ time after (and honestly what feels like a little before) that.

      • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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        14 hours ago

        It was in the news a while back that Trump had a Russian Handler and that he was first approached in the late 1980s. There might be more to the story now but it was already known back before the 2020 elections. I would go searching for it, but trying to find old news articles with a search engine causes me actual physical pain.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          trying to find old news articles with a search engine causes me actual physical pain

          This is a huge problem that people donā€™t pay attention to, BTW. (Not your pain, but the difficulty in searching for old news.)